Tetrad Collective: July 2010

Coming out of your MFA leaves you with a few symptoms of postpartum. Namely because the overdrive you've been in for two years abruptly ends. You suddenly gain back thirteen usable hours in each day? STOP IT. In the midst of the ever-daunting job search, this crackerjack sits the bench and talks art in hopes to remain savvy post grad school.

Let's start with a little Jeremy Gilbert Rolfe who visited SFAI this year and left behind a whole lot of painters with a new found art crush. His inspiring lecture led me to read, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime, which I am still making my way through and recommend to others. The prose is unpretentious with golden nuggets of definition that help to make finite that which is infinite, which is the relationship I was thinking about today as I began to delve into Chapter III.

This came up because of my somewhat limited background in philosophy, so whenever I'm reading this theory I'm also normally googling whoever it is that I don't quite have all the cards to, to make a full deck. Let me also say that because of this whatever I say in regards to the text or philosopher is speculation and not criticism or fact. Nonetheless, it is valuable for my practice in order to help me define what it is that I am doing and perhaps may trigger some interesting thoughts for others. Today's google was Hegel, the German philosopher who follows in the footsteps of Kant.

What I got from my small research endeavor is that Hegel saw the relationship of the finite and the infinite not as a dualistic or binary but as something more total, they exist within each other. The infinite becomes finite because being conceptual it needs the confines of language in order to exist. Infinite only exists in the word infinite, which makes it finite. Therefore, they exist not opposing each other but within each other.

This (and Rolfe's statement, "The principal of an art is put to work by what it is not. That application of (eighteenth-century formulations of) art, which was also an assault upon it (and them), fueled and was a fundamental of the desire of much of modernism to bring art closer to life, including the invisible life of the unconscious," the unconscious = infinite and abstract in my stream of thought) makes me think of the relationship between abstraction and representation (which as an 'abstract' painter is a frequent matter of contemplation) which also exists within and not opposed to each other. The idea that abstract work is the most representational and vice versa. The abstract takes the role of the infinite, the representational that of the finite, which can be transversed. The abstract mark in its generality is actually too specific to be anything other than what it is referencing while the explicit representational can be endlessly deconstructed.

Can binary relationships then only exist in physical characteristics? Because concepts will always have some of the opposing concept within itself? Are principals as absolute as Rolfe claims, "The principal of art is put to work by what it is not,"?

Drop us a response if you please!

For giggles here are some other good reads (because I have a book for every mood...one with coffee, one with wine, one with freezing cold beach even though its summer because I live in San Francisco):

The Picture of Dorian Gray: Oscar Wilde
The Savage Detectives: Roberto Bolano
Born to Run: Chris McDougall

Cheers,

Kate